You

You, alone, staring at a blank space and waiting for a voice: this is the true beginning of art. After that, you can read every fucking book in the world, but when it gets shitty and forced and blocked, you must return to yourself.

This is why art is so difficult. Because you must always return to you, alone, staring at a blank space and waiting to hear a voice. You must be alone, afraid but hopeful, struggling but faithful.

And you must do everything you can to protect this pipeline between you and your creative spirits; to shut up every voice in your head and to cut off every distraction; to wait, sometimes for a heartbreakingly long time, for those true things—

your voice, your story, your characters, and your meaning. THIS is the true place of creation: a quiet, comfortable place where one waits in good faith, half-amused and half-exhausted, in dread and wonder, for something beyond them to flow through them.